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As part of ongoing, continuous research into the successful use of Enterprise Content Management, regardless of shape, size, industry, etc., I'm posting an open call for ECM case studies. If you are part of an organization that has successfully deployed ECM, and are willing to talk about it (anonymous or publicly), comment to this post or contact me privately via dkeldsen[at]aiim[dot]org.

All too often I hear that companies can't afford to manage their content, or are unable to show a "hard dollar" Return On Investment (ROI) that the CFO or controller will buy off on.

Your case study (with permission of course) could very well end up in upcoming research, webinars, or any number of outputs. In any case, what's the point of having a community of over 50,000 associates in the AIIM universe directly, if we can't share in and magnify the successes we've found within our own organizations?

Pipe up - and let's hear how you've done. Being smarter with content, processes, collaboration and more - there are even more reasons to pursue this when the economy is unstable. Out of control content, and insight into content/data is part of what got the world into this mess!

Rather than assume we know it all when it comes to the world of Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow, we're looking for feedback (as we did with Findability) on what companies should be considered on the list of solution providers for BPM and Workflow.

The twist is that we are not limiting this list to "pure-play" BPM providers, as fun as that might be.

We're interested in Document-centric Workflow/BPM and Transaction-based Workflow/BPM as well, which heads into the direction of larger platforms - Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suites as well as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suites. (If you care about business process - does it matter to YOU whether it's baked in to a bigger solution, or prefer BPM that is agnostic?)

Below is a guaranteed incomplete list of the types of providers we're considering having listed in the upcoming BPM survey. Who are we missing, and for that matter, who shouldn't be on the list? Even given acquisition/consolidation, it's a big ol' world of process.

So, who are we missing, and for that matter, who shouldn't be on the list? For example, does Adobe belong on this list? If no, why not? If yes, why? or Oracle? In or out? SaaS and Open Source options - SpringCM and Alfresco. Valid? Useless? (for this list)

Anyone representing a solution provider who should be on here, feel free to weigh in, don't be shy - there's no magic involved in this list. Process practitioners/consultants, your insights are especially wanted.

That the staff could be so negligent as to let a woman die in the waiting room (having been waiting nearly 24 hours, mind you) is one thing, and clearly some major changes needs to occur at this facility.

To the topic at hand however, what are the potential problems of dealing with inauthentic/false content?

Well, in this case, not only did staff (allegedly, I suppose) ignore a dying/dead woman, they altered/falsified the records of her actions/status to try to cover it up.

"Contrary to what was recorded from four different angles by the
hospital's video cameras, the patient's medical records say that at 6
a.m., she got up and went to the bathroom, and at 6:20 a.m. she was
'sitting quietly in waiting room' -- more than 10 minutes since she
last moved and 48 minutes after she fell to the floor."

Wow.

Do YOUR systems support verifiable, tamper-proof audit trails? Are you synchronizing the date/timestamps of related systems, such as in this case, video surveillance? In many cases, it would be unnecessary to go to such lengths, and in such dire situations as this example, but I certainly hope that the footage and records in this case can withstand scrutiny and bring justice and extreme change in this broken facility.

Can people back-date contracts in your organization? Invoices? E-mail messages? If you needed to roll-back your entire system to a certain point in time to see exactly what offers were made to who and when, could you do it? When it comes down to it, can you trust your employees, and the systems they use, to do the right thing? I hope so.

Always handy when a conference you want to go to, AND happen to be keynoting at (with colleague Carl Frappaolo), is a 15 minute walk from your office. Good thing too, as I needed to run back and forth multiple times over the week to sneak in and out and still get work done while catching up with the latest news, and the happenings of so many friends and colleagues in this space.

For all that's wrong with Twitter (horrible downtime being among the top 2), this is the 2nd event where the universe of "friends/followers" I have on Twitter has truly astonished me. Why? Making it easy to find and be found in the crowd of 1,200 attendees, and already be up to speed with what they're thinking before having actually "met them" (in person, or "real life" as some still like to think of it).

But in the end, the comments, discussions, backroom chatter and yes "traditional" coverage was quite amazing.

If you missed the show, the video for our keynote (officially titled "Enterprise 2.0 - A State of the Industry Address" and for our purposes "Enterprise 2.0 FTW!") is up as well - at a mere 15 minutes, surely you can take a break. The splicing of the slides into the live presentation leaves a bit to be desired (you may want to grab a copy of the deck via slideshare, and have it up in a 2nd window). When I get a chance, I'll take a stab at editing it for better flow and context - but the video provided by TechWeb is what we have for now.

Anyone who has captured photos, audio, video, or any other commentary, speak up, and point us at the goods... much appreciated.

Below is a listing (in no particular order) of the various places conversations, comments, articles, and the like have popped up based on our presentations and overall research last week.

If I have missed coverage, or you do not have your own public forum for providing feedback, please feel free to chime in here.

BTW - We may reprise our characters from the keynote presentation in future iterations, and your feedback would be much appreciated so we can improve on the next go around (and the next). Should I lose the moustache for the next go around?Recent Coverage:Enterprise 2.0 Generational Divide Largely a Myth (CIO Magazine - Jon Brodkin)

Having spent 2 years diving into innovation and idea management, I know there is more to innovation than getting together in a room once a year and breaking out the post-it notes.

There's also more to innovation than simply asking the crowd to provide ideas, and assuming that all of those ideas are good to great, and executable within a reasonable timeframe, or monetary investment.

Neither of these are bad, they simply aren't sufficient.

Also, having just spent several months analyzing the data that lead to our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 which followed on our Market IQ on Content Security - collaboration and sharing of content cannot and should not ALWAYS be out in the open.

Financial Services companies get this - that's why they are prohibited from sharing information across the "chinese firewall" between the research and sales arms - it's called collusion, not collaboration. That's why pharmaceutical companies lock away their R&D - the FDA will tear them apart, as will their competitors, if there are not tight controls on their processes (including collaboration, reporting, etc.). There's a time and place for total transparency, total secrecy, and the gray space in between.

Which is why it's all the more troubling to hear a fellow analyst jump in and declare a decade old market NEW, and a single solution as "the only enterprise class solution" when it hasn't even existed in a production state for 2 years (perhaps not 1, hard to trace from the info I'm finding).

"Benioff calls it an 'IdeaExchange,' an 'entirely new way to listen to
customers on how to build great enterprise software, and satisfy their
needs.' What’s entirely new about a blog-like site with comments and
voting is somewhat of a mystery..."

That's perhaps a bit harsh, although he has a point. A shiny front-end is only part of the game, which is what troubles me about people who are obsessed with AJAX, widgets, rounded corners and cool company/product names.

Below is the comment I'd posted on Jeremiah's blog, with live links, and for archive purposes. Presumably the comment will pass moderation and be live on his blog shortly as well. I see that Matt Greeley, CEO of Brightidea is a bit fired up about this as well.

My comments:

The "suggestion box" approach can provide some value, and I'm now trying out UserVoice and IdeaScale as well. Interesting timing in the blogosphere on this one!

A completely open suggestion box, can however have some major downsides - even though I'm a believer in participation, openness and transparency, the stats on innovation show that focus is needed to maximize the value of these efforts.

As @DellDawn suggests, the whole management process itself is significant. Creating the front-end, vote up/down, commentary and status isn't rocket science. Nearly any blog can do that right now with a few widgets to provide ranking, combined with typical commenting and categories/tagging.

Innovation Management and Idea Management imply and end-to-end process, including the idea generation component on through filtering for duplicates, dumb ideas, things that have already been done, as well as genuine useful and relevant ideas that can be taken to market.

And I have to say, Salesforce.com is not nearly the first or the most successful "open innovation" solution.

This entire movement is born out of the Voice of the Customer movement, itself coming from marketing techniques that go back to the earliest days of focus groups. It's just at a different scale - small i innovation (incremental) rather than radical BIG I INNOVATION (brand new, never been seen before).

Some other competitors that have moved beyond the web-enabled open suggestion box: BrightIdea, Imaginatik, and MindMatters. All of which existed well before Salesforce commercialized their solution.

So, I'd say it is patently false to say that "IdeaExchange is the only enterprise class version" of anything. It's a logical extension of the Salesforce platform - pulling data in from the outside (consumers, users), and marrying to their traditional datasource, handled by marketing and sales people and processes feeding in the CRM/SFA engines. Not "the only" by a long shot.

For someone else's thoughts on the open innovation, wisdom of crowds front, see Mark Turrell's recent YouTube video which describes more of the pros/cons of various approaches. He's CEO of Imaginatik, so hardly unbiased, but he's been involved in this type of work for nearly 10 years, and can provide far more detailed anecdotes on the hard results of these systems.

I'll close with the wisdom that venture capitalists know all too well. Ideas are nothing. It's execution that counts. How do you execute on 100, 1,000 or 10,000 submitted ideas? You can't wing it, you need processes and systems in place, or you are toast.

Innovation at the enterprise-level is hard work, even when tapping the crowd. And as Henry Ford said "If I listened to my customers, I would've bred a faster horse." Suggestions frequently (but not always) require interpretation.

To those who provided input on the Findability questions recently - thank you for the extra eyes and brains in helping us to round out the focus for the survey. The extra 10-20 vendors added to the list was very handy. Survey is coming real soon... stay tuned.

Now, looking for more feedback (ala Open Innovation, Wisdom of Crowds, Crowdcasting, etc..) as to what we should be covering, topically, moving forward.

We've already delivered two Market IQs, one on Enterprise 2.0 (>900 downloads in the last month), Content Security (>1300 downloads), and are now embarking on Findability (survey launching within 24 hours).

What else should we be covering in the next 12-18 months?

Infinitely easier for you (and you, over there in the corner) to simply weigh in and vote on what you'd like us to cover. See the "micropoll" below, and feel free to invite others to provide their opinion as well.

Content, Information, Knowledge, Process - what can we provide that would help you and your organization?

As we're prepping for the next Market IQ (on Findability), I'm curious what people think of the "Crossing the Chasm"-style analysis we've done in the previous two Market IQs - Enterprise 2.0 and Content Security.

Figure 19: Where Do You Feel the Overall INDUSTRY Adoption Is with Regard to the Following
Terms/Phrases?

Figure 20: Where Do You Feel YOUR ORGANIZATION’S Adoption Is with Regard to the FollowingTechnologies?

Carl and I think these findings are useful barometers to see how people are judging themselves (or their organizations) versus the larger market. But we could be the only two people on the planet who think so, for all I know.

If so, what are the handful of terms/phrases/concepts that should be included? We don't want to annoy people with a huge list, as these questions are best asked as two sets of matrixed options, and I must say, can be annoying simply to create.

Currently we're considering:

Search
Taxonomy
Information Architecture
User interface
Tagging

Good, bad, indifferent? Feel free to weigh in with alternatives, or shoot it down entirely.

Your feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks to everyone (quite a crowd) who has chimed in with companies/solutions that we did not have listed on the solution-side for Findability. Feel free to continue commenting there as well.

Presented a subset of our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 findings today at the Boston KM Forum hosted at Bentley. Specifically dived into the Knowledge Management-oriented aspects of Enterprise 2.0.

Not claiming by a far stretch that Enterprise 2.0 is exactly Knowledge Management 2.0 (or vice-versa), but there are some great overlaps. The battery of a dozen profiling questions (a modified version of the KM2 Methodology we've used in the past) that we'd used in the survey popped out a subset of respondents who were "KM Inclined" - and that served as the main data used in this presentation.

If you've already seen our webinar, or read the report, this presentation may be redundant, although the front 2/3rds is new material, setting up the discussion of Enterprise 2.0 in general, Knowledge Management 1.0, and where we seem to be heading.

A fellow was recording the audio, we'll see if I was loud enough to make it worth syncing up and posting - in the meantime, you can probably follow along with what I'm trying to get across, but feel free to let me know if it's clear or mud! (BTW - if you aren't seeing the commenting area, hit me on twitter, and let me know you're having issues. Seems something has gone wrong with Internet Explorer 7 viewers [use Firefox and it's fine - hint hint])

InsideView recently introduced the concept of "Socialprise" as a framework for understanding the way in which the unstructured data of social networks and media are influencing enterprises. A newly announced product, SalesView, is specifically designed to mash-up social data with search and intelligence capabilities to help sales teams automate prospecting, accelerate sales cycles and close more deals. (see http://www.insideview.com/cat-company-press.html for more details)

InsideView are essentially a meta-meta-aggregator of relationship and social data, which can be used to infuse/enrich Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, or be used as a stand-alone tool similar in some respects to ZoomInfo (one of their underlying data sources) or other "relationship/contact databases" such as Hoover's.

What does InsideView bring to the table? It helps to provide salespeople and marketers further informaiton to understand their prey, customers and prospects beyond the bare minimum information (such as name, phone, e-mail, company name, title) they might otherwise have to work with in their CRM or Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems.

They are a meta-meta-aggregator in the sense that they are aggregating (collecting) information from multiple sources, and that their underlying data sources can also be aggregating information from multiple sources (such as ZoomInfo). This extends the reach and richness of the information that they are able to pull back on behalf of users of their system, in a similar fashion to the functionality of federated search or universal search in more traditional enterprise search.

In an ideal world, or at least with the smarter salespeople and marketers, such information will help to weed out who the appropriate people are to engage in more targeted discussions, and to engage in informed conversations of the "2.0 age" rather than in continuing to hammer out cold-calls and blanket, un-personalized (or badly personalized) mass-marketing.

The various sources that they tap for this information are a mix of both typical structured data sources as well as in crawling and pulling in unstructured information that would contain social/relationship information (such as from blogs, Facebook etc.). InsideView has a wide range of paid and free sources that they aggregate and examine to algorithmically determine the relevancy and accuracy of this information. Factors would include such things as: the recency of updated information, determining whether the self-owned and updated sources (such as profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook) are more accurate than automated information collected via subscription service, and so on.

Between the acquisitions of SRD via IBM (in 2005), Interface Software by Lexis Nexis (in 2004), and Contact Networks now part of Thomson West (as of January 2008), this aspect of social networking or social intelligence/relationship intelligence is adding serious firepower for internal enterprise users.

I've been talking about just this sort of "relationship enrichment" or "relationship intelligence" since 2003/2004. When I was with Delphi Group, we began rolling this functionality into the world of "Information Intelligence" as a higher-level topic, with several conferences discussing the mashup of business intelligence, dashboards, search, knowledge management, portals, and more, into a "meta layer" that could unify all of the mess of siloed content/information/data/knowledge underneath. In 2008 we might be more tempted to simply call all of this Enterprise 2.0 (see our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0).

Social networking is not purely about person-to-person connections, or in providing a virtual watercooler (or virtual voyeur perhaps) view into your "friends" (peers, co-workers, etc.) but also for the ability of participants IN the network to use the data within that network to become smarter in the ways that they interact with the people in that network.

This would provide both the ability to build communities explicitly for the sake of building a community, as well as in using that community as a source of "intelligence" to provide deeper insights into the community as a whole (collective intelligence or "the wisdom of crowds"), as well as the individuals themselves.

All of this latent "social information" is buried in the heap of individual silos both inside and outside of the control of any one corporate, even deeper than "normal" (spreadsheets, reports, PDFs, etc.) electronic information is. Sadly, most organizations have only just recently begun to understand the value of their more explicit "information assets" (even the value of intellectual property in the form of patents are not well understood in many organizations) and the idea of including social/relationship intelligence as a valued asset is well behind that train in the majority of cases I've come across.

There is a giant opportunity here, and for myself, I'm looking forward to the day when we can turn around say "How in the world did we even function without the ability to tap our relationship intelligence?" The early adopters for this type of functionality may easily run away with marketshare, if their competitors stay asleep too long.

Once you've had a chance to digest the content, pipe up with your comments here, and we can discuss how the >400 person sample population lines up with YOUR reality. Did we find collective intelligence in our survey respondents, or something else?